Stress Vs. Burnout: What is the Difference?

Have you ever had a moment where, unexpectedly, you realize that you have been exhausted for the last few years? One busy season stretched into a few busy years, and now you can’t remember the last time you truly had some peace. It might be necessary to adapt to ongoing stress, but it’s not healthy to continue without a break and without taking stock of your well-being.

Stress and burnout are two words that are often used interchangeably, and while they are connected, there is a particularly important distinction between the two words. Knowing what stress is and how to manage it might help you adjust your lifestyle to prevent burnout.

What is stress?

Many of us have a vague notion that stress equals being busy. To be under stress means that you are doing everything you can to keep your head above the water and meet deadlines or demands as best you can. This might be the normal state for most workplaces and many large households, but stress is not a normal or healthy state to continuously live or work in.

When we talk about stress, what we are referring to is a physical, mental, and emotional reaction to an event. Stress is a process that starts in your nervous system with the release of the hormone cortisol. This hormone prepares your body for a physical reaction because the nervous system has identified a threat that needs to be faced.

People react to stressful situations in a few different ways, depending on their personality type and personal history. They might deal with stress by rising to the occasion with inventive ways of completing the task or meeting the challenge. Alternatively, they might look for an escape route and try to avoid the situation. Others become frozen almost in a state of shock and don’t know what to do next. This is known as the “fight, flight, or freeze response.”

The stress cycle

Stress itself is not a problem. It is a regular part of everyday life and work, and everyone must face it. It is how you face it that determines how it will affect you. The stress cycle can be pictured as a circle. At the top of the circle is your most preferred state of being, called your homeostasis. This is where you are at your happiest and healthiest; where everything is balanced, calm, and flowing well.

Into this state comes a stressor, which is any event that threatens your homeostasis or threatens to throw you off balance. This could be a last-minute change of plans, a forgotten deadline, a health development, or a combination of events coming to you at once.

This is where your fight, flight, or freeze response comes into effect. Everyone has different stress responses, and what might be alarming and cause stress to one person, might not be an issue to someone else. For example, many adults of all ages find it stressful to have to make a phone call to book a doctor’s appointment. While this might seem like a non-issue, many people perceive it as a genuine threat and would rather not have to face it.

The cycle is closed when the potential threat, or stressor, has been dealt with. It is only when you have resolved the issue that your nervous system can go off high alert and begin to relax, flooding your body with hormones that will calm you down and help get you back to homeostasis.

Can you spot the problem of ongoing stress? It is when you don’t complete that cycle to reach homeostasis or balance, again. What tends to happen is that stressor after stressor comes your way, meaning that you are constantly caught in the fight, flight, or freeze response and your nervous system is constantly having to flood your body with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to face threat after threat.

When you have a moment to reflect on your exhaustion, you will realize how your body is working overtime to provide you with the necessary hormones and chemicals to face the never-ending threats to homeostasis. Ongoing stress has a debilitative effect on you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Stress vs. Burnout: What is the difference?

Ongoing stress can be visualized as someone’s desk at work. If you can picture unprocessed paperwork piled high in an in-tray with nothing in the out-tray, with little time to get things done, and working space in complete disarray, you will see a practical example of what ongoing stress looks like for most people. Of course, this picture is quite literal for most people who are stressed out at work or home.

The endless issues that pile up without resolution are the very picture of what being overwhelmed feels like. Issues flood in, not allowing you to deal with the ones already there, and pretty soon your body can no longer keep up.

Even if your stress response had been a fight response, meaning you were tackling every problem that came your way, over time you would find yourself either trying to avoid further issues or becoming frozen in not knowing what to do next.

Burnout occurs when you are overwhelmed with stress, and you can no longer find balance or homeostasis. The beginning stages of burnout occur as you feel yourself shutting down. Your emotions may numb and your resolve to complete tasks weaken.

If you ignore these feelings, you will find yourself simply going through the motions of life, completely disengaged and uncaring about any important thing. This is what advanced burnout looks like. It often results in physical ailments and serious health issues.

Recovery

It can take as much as three years of solid, intentional rest for the body to recover from a prolonged period of burnout. Many people struggle to switch off after experiencing years of stress, despite being exhausted in every way. When you have adapted to dealing with stress daily, the real shock to the system can come in the form of scaling back duties or changing your routine completely.

If you have accepted that you need a change, and you are willing to take some intentional steps to make a healthier lifestyle, your first step could be to talk with a medical doctor. Prolonged exposure to stress can result in high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, digestive issues, sex-drive problems, migraines, and a weakened immune system. Some of these can be fatal problems, but all can be regulated, controlled, or aided by medication.

Stress can cause people to become depressed, constantly anxious, or develop insomnia. As a result, many people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with stress. This is usually to make an ongoing bleak situation feel less awful but can lead to addictions, reliance on chemicals, or eating disorders, making for a more complex problem.

In recovery, there is a riddle question that is helpful to think of. It is, “How do you eat an elephant?” and the answer is, “One bite at a time.” The mere thought of making lifestyle changes can be as overwhelming as dealing with never-ending stress, but every lifestyle, whether healthy or harmful, is built one action and habit at a time.

Getting help with stress and burnout

Recovery and healing from burnout are possible, though it requires patience and lots of rest. It’s not always easy or possible to deal with every single stressful issue one at a time to its resolve, but it does help to try. There are many things to consider when it comes to dealing with stress and avoiding burnout. The best you can do is to take things one task, one hour, and one day at a time.

Everyone needs help dealing with stress from time to time. Counseling provides an excellent opportunity to offload some of your burdens, identify how you can make changes, or simply to be a listener with someone who has no expectations or demands of you. If you think this sounds way overdue, it probably is. Your well-being is worth making changes for. As a mental health therapist, I invite you to reach out to me directly if you don’t know where else to start.